As we begin our own Age of the Strongman, Hussein’s almost effortless manipulation—of soldiers expecting exactly that behavior—shows how susceptible we all might be to the sheer force of a big personality.

All of us, at some point over the last six months, have wished in one way or another that we could be anesthetized. That we could chemically numb the parts of our brains that flare out with anxiety every time our phones (those luminous portals of dread) vibrate with a news alert. That we could […]

A Buffalo bookstore owner was the target of an FBI investigation for more than two years, and now he wants to know why. Can independent bookstores survive in the state that gave us Antonin Scalia and Tony Soprano? San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood will not, after all, be a bookstore-free zone. Dog Eared Books is set to […]

Writing for Publishers Weekly, William J. Maxwell examines the 1,884-page FBI file on James Baldwin—the longest on record—as part of his effort to obtain surveillance information on African American authors through the Freedom of Information Act. Along with reports on literary giants like Lorraine Hansberry and Amiri Baraka, Baldwin’s file reveals a complex relationship between […]

Authors who worried the FBI might have been monitoring them were absolutely right, especially for Harlem Renaissance era authors. For more than half a century, the FBI kept tabs on black authors, tracking their movements and writing pages of reports critiquing their writing, reports the Guardian. Targets of the investigation included writers like Richard Wright, in part […]

“My parents, with admirable foresight, had their first child while they were on fellowships in the United States. My mother was in public health, and my father in a library-science program. Having an American baby was, my mother once said, like putting money in the bank.” So begins Daniel Alarcón (who is reading at the […]

Over at The Awl, Maud Newton asks how scared we should be of groups like the Hutaree militia, which was recently broken up by the FBI for planning attacks on law enforcement. On the one hand, she says, “When the Tea Party kicks you out of its massive tent, and neighboring militias dismiss you as […]

“In the 1930s, Studs Terkel applied to the FBI to be a fingerprint guy — maybe if he’d gotten the job, we would have had “CSI: Studs Terkel.” But the FBI turned him away and in 1945 began surveillance that would last for more than four decades.” At Jacket Copy, Carolynn Kellogg reports that the […]

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